Friday, June 11, 2004

Superpowers for rent

IBM, which has begun a program to rent its own supercomputer power to outside users, has signed on a partner that uses the service for its own specialized offering. Landmark Graphics, a Halliburton subsidiary that processes seismic data to help oil and gas companies find reserves, will base its service on IBM's computing resources, the companies said this week.

IBM rents out the power of two "Deep Computing Capacity on Demand Centers" housing clusters of networked Linux machines in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Montpellier, France. Customers pay by how much processing power they need; Hewlett-Packard has a similar offering for digital animation customers. Landmark first used IBM for Linux help in 2002.

very very interesting. I wonder what trajectory this trend will take. Obviously, this is a very early adopter stage. I am interested in seeing how many of these announcements we are going to see in the next 12 months, and also in seeing some numbers, technical and financial, reported for these deals.